On devices with touchscreen displays it is often necessary to input text. This is generally done through either a physical keyboard, or through the representation of a keyboard on the touchscreen display.
In general, a keypad on a touchscreen display is small and located towards either the bottom or the top of the work area in order to provide a user with the ability to see a work area and what is being typed. Alternatively, if the keyboard is large, the work area is obscured and the user does not know what has been typed.
One solution to this is to implement a transparent virtual keypad on the touchscreen. An example of this was found in April 2004 on the website of lakefolks.org which includes keyboard transparency. This site teaches a keyboard that can be used on a personal computer where a mouse click causes a key to be registered in an application. A slider found using a menu option allows the user to make the keyboard more or less transparent.
On a wireless device, a transparent keypad was shown in April 2004 on the website of symbitz.com. This site teaches the use of a transparent keypad only for a handheld device.
The above solutions, however, do not provide the user with the ease of quickly changing the transparency of the keypad, nor do they present an optimal layout for the keys on a keypad.